This really depends on where you went to school. In the southern US, public school teachers that aren't jaded and/or burned out were (at least back when I was in school) the exception rather than the rule. I got the impression that they'd all rather be doing something else, but some of them were just better than others at putting their best game face on and facing the day.

I truly never did experience any teachers who were there for anything other than the meager paycheck. My middle school guidance counselor even had a side gig delivering pizzas. Nothing like an adult who hasn't got his own act together and whose job is ostensibly to help kids make decisions about their futures.

*laughs in public school*

What I do remember most was one of my teachers who clearly was phoning it in every day. He'd read the classifieds looking for motorcycle parts at his desk while the class was doing some boring assignment from the textbooks. Every once in awhile he'd complain about how miserable the pay was, and how if you didn't like his minimal-effort approach to learning, you were welcome to stand in the hall for the duration of the period.

Fun times.

I distinctly remember owning one of these about 20 years ago. Granted, back then smartphones were for business users and tech enthusiasts, they really hadn't caught on with the normies yet.
 

My group of friends would futz around with computers quite a bit back in the late 90s. I still mostly keep in touch with all of them to varying degrees. One joined the military, was honorably discharged due to an injury, and now drives a long-haul truck. Another started as a low-paid IT support jockey and never really settled into anything you could call a career. The friend I keep in closest contact with, works a senior support position with a software company (not one of the major industry players, though) and makes somewhere around $100k/yr. Granted, that's a decent-ish living, but that kind of money doesn't go as far these days as it used to. I went into HVAC, which everybody and their brother seems to be doing in Florida, so there's a huge race to the bottom in this trade.

Success is a fuckin' crapshoot when you don't have wealthy parents.

We're talking porn. That already requires having somewhat selective moral standards to run a business in that industry. It made sense to oppose age verification when there was the potential to lose business, but the calculus changed once it became clear that this is just the new regulatory framework they have to operate under. Otherwise, compliant competitors will take the market share that Pornhub willingly relinquished.

Do you not understand how the US legal system works? It went to the SCOTUS. That's it, end of the line - it's not getting overturned. Plus, if it wasn't obvious, no politician wants to campaign on "let's let kids access porn" (which is exactly how their opponent would frame it), so there's a snowball's chance in hell that the democratic process itself would ever undo these age gate laws. Most people agree that kids shouldn't have access to adult material, so these laws have broad bipartisan support, even if the actual implementation is flawed as fuck.

Pornhub's access blocking made sense when there was still some possibility that the laws would be overturned. That ship basically sailed when the SCOTUS determined that Texas's age gate laws are constitutional. I'm really not sure what Pornhub's expected endgame is to their bury our head in the sand and hope it's all just a bad dream strategy.

Most of the devices kids use these days have locked bootloaders. You're not installing Linux on a current gen iPhone or iPad, and Samsung locks their stuff down too.

If some kid really wants to fap to porn on his desktop rig that he installed Linux on, that's something only the clutchiest of pearl clutchers is worrying about.

Texas and Florida aren't blue states.

Because having to verify your age with multiple different companies is clearly superior to just doing it once and being done with it?

Look, I get it when some people say they don't want any age checks. That's how the internet used to work, and it's not entirely unreasonable to place the burden of parenting (ie keeping kids away from age inappropriate content by enabling the appropriate parental controls) on parents. But a few states already have age gate laws that work the way you're describing (at the site level) and:

It's annoying for adults.
It doesn't work to keep kids away from inappropriate content.
There's no way to implement the age checks without massive privacy concerns.

Given the choice, I'd prefer no age checks at all - but my preference for a lesser evil would be to just verify once with Microsoft/Apple/Google (in all likelihood, they already have the information needed to determine I'm an adult anyway) and be done with it forever.

You pretty much have to produce content that follows an established formula or audiences won't like it. One of my favorite examples of this was the Little Shop of Horrors film from the 80s. It was based on a stage musical (which itself was loosely based on a 1960s B-movie). The original ending from the play has the main character killed and the alien plants taking over the world. Test audiences hated it. A new ending was re-shot and what was supposed to be a tragedy became a heroic redemption arc story.

Not too long ago, Disney actually did release an animated film that wasn't tied to some established franchise: Elio. It flopped.

Disney's studios produce content that gets people to visit their theme parks. The theme parks are still packed, at least from what I've seen. So, mission accomplished.

That's pretty much where all the eyeballs are these days, and anyone with the most minimal amount of respect for their sanity opts for ad-free tier of paid streaming services (or just gets their content from the high seas, which also doesn't have ads), so you're not getting movie trailers on TV unless you specifically go searching for them.

Whichever studio is behind the upcoming He-Man film sure has been promoting the fuck out of that on Facebook. It still looks absolutely awful, not that I'm surprised - it's based on an IP that was originally created as a glorified toy commercial. Besides, all it takes for the money you spent promoting a bad film to be wasted, is a handful of influencers on the social media site formerly known as Twitter saying "It's trash, wait until it hits streaming." I guess we'll see how it does at the box office in a few days.

If "free" Plex can't transcode and can't stream externally, you may as well skip it entirely and just run something like FileZilla on your media server and use Kodi on the client(s). In fact, I lived with this exact setup until I got around to finally setting up JellyFin.

There hasn't been anything on OTA TV that I've cared to watch ever since all the major networks moved anything halfway decent behind the paywalls of their respective branded streaming services.

Well, we can't have them using the same Dell laptops as the worker drones, now can we? Do you have any idea how much RAM it takes to send a Teams chat message to remind everyone that you'll be unavailable after 1PM because you've got golf today?

Think of the golf, man.